So I loves my news aggregators, and I loves my social news sites. You may have also heard of a new breed of such sites, which aggregate shared bookmarks via Google Reader (and more), such as readburner, linkriver, and rssmeme.

Anywhoo, I was about to wax poetic about how useful these new services are, when, upon closer examination, I realized that much of the stuff that was bookmarked and shared was quite similar … even the same, really.

Oh, sure. Smaller stories are different. Each community has its own idiosyncracies. But the big (and even medium sized) stories? All the same.

Right now I’m battling what seems like an evolving cold, so I’m not going to do any heavy lifting with respect to numbers, charts, graphs, and all manner of social geekery (but if you feel so inclined, please do so and then let me know) — but its just an observation.

I wonder, as all the field of social information-aggregating services mature, particularly in areas where this kind of thing started (tech / geek interests), if what we’re seeing in late 2007 and well into 2008 is the evolution and commodification of popular content.

That’s not to say that the information or content itself is a commodity, specifically, but that the sites themselves might begin to be.

Or, put another way, the stuff that is popular, and that is shared, gets shared so quickly between the various and sundry sites, it doesn’t really matter which site you go to. Unless your level of geekdom is extreme, and it matters to you how quickly you see stuff (in the order of minutes or hours), for the lay-geek — you know, who has a job, who goes to work, who has a family, and who can’t monitor this stuff as obsessively as they would like — I don’t think it *really* matters.

If I’m looking for old-ish kind of news (like 12-24h old — man, I can’t believe I just called news that was 12h old “old”), I can look to Blogrunner, Techmeme, Digg, Propeller, and one of those shared-bookmarking sites above, and you can bet the big stories will all be up there.

The implications?

That its tough for new sites to break into this ecosystem of shared / social news, as there is already a huge contingent of players looking for news (social news sites), or automated bots which are similarly crawling for said news (news aggregators), or scripts that are looking for people to share such information (social / shared bookmarking tools) — all of which, when they find something newsworthy, is thrown up on all of these sites in a variety of ways, overlapping each other within minutes or hours of each other.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds for Social News, but on a cold blustery Friday evening, I’m wondering if we’re at a stage where we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with few services really providing a breakthrough in this experience.